From the Precession of Simulacra

sociology under Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. In 1966, he began teaching at the University of Paris at Nanten·e. During this time, he )Vas associated with Roland Barthes, whose ideas deeply influ- enced Baudrillard's first book, The System of Objects (1968). After reading the work of kIarshali McLuhan, Baudrillard began to see the symbolic representations of culture in mass media to be the basis for pelionning sociological analysis. After the student revolt at Nanterre in 1968, he wrote for a typicaljoumal of the time, Utopie, using Marxist analysis to critique the symbols of capitalism. He eventually came to regard Ma1:r:ism itself a sYlnbolist ideology produced by the mass culture of capi- talism, and to lose his oppositional stance against mass media and technology. His later works dis- cuss the extreme reproducibility of images and sounds through electronic media fOl111S, creating, in Baudrillard's terminology, a culture of the "hyperreal." He became maItre-assistant (assistant pro- fessor) at Nanterre from 1970 to 1987. He is curren(ly professor of philosophy of culture and media criticism at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His books include Consumer Society (1970), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), The Mirror of Production (1973), In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983), Simulations (1983), Forget Foucault (1987), Simulacra and Simulations (1988), Seduction (1990), The lllusion of the End (1992), The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995), The 'perfect Crime (1996), America (1998), The Spirit of Terrorism (2001), Screened Out (2002), and Passwords (2003). Thefollowing essay is taken from Simulations.

From The Precessionl of Simulacra

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical none. 2 beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness The simulacrum is true. - ECCLESIASTES to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, If we were able to take as the finest allegory of returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an simulation the Borges tale3 where the cartogra- aging double ends up being confused with the phers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed real thing) - then this fable has come full circle that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but for us, and now has nothing but the discrete where the decline of the Empire sees this map charm of second-order simulacra.4 Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, Translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton. the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation IBalldrillard's title hinges on a scientific term that refers to the "wobble" of anything spinning that is also acted on by an is no longer that of a territory, a referential being outside force (including gravity). For example the axis of the or a substance. It is the generation by models of earth's rotation wobbles very slowly (the period is 18,600 a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The years), so that different stars have been (and in due course will territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives be) in the position now held by Polaris. One of the proofs of it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the Einstein's theory of relativity was its correct predictions about the precession in the orbit of Mercury. Possibly Baudrillard's territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the point is that the ability to map our world depends on such map that engenders the territory and if we were to imperceptible phenomena. revive the fable today, it would be the territory 2Ecc1esiastes is a biblical book containing worldly. some- times cynical wisdom, but nothing remotely resembling this particular text is to be found there. 4Cf. J. Baudrillard, L'Echange syJnho/ique et fa mOrl, 3"On Exactitude in Science" (1960), by Jorge Luis Borges ("L'Ordre des simulacres"), Paris, Gallimard, 1975. (1 899-1986). [BaudrillardJ

THEORIZING POSTMODERNISM whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges sub- machine which provides all the signs of the real sist here and there, in the deserts which are no and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again longer those of the Empire, but our own. The will the real have to be produced - this is the desert of the real itself. vital function of the model in a system of death, In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. or rather of anticipated resurrection which no Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. longer leaves any chance even in the event of For it is with the same Imperialism that present- death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the day simulators try to make the real, all the real, imaginary, and from any distinction between the coincide with their simulation models. But it is no real and the imaginary, leaving room only for longer a question of either maps or territory. the orbital recurrence of models and the simu- Something has disappeared: the sovereign differ- lated generation of difference. ence between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, THE DIVINE IRREFERENCE OF IlVIAGES the magic of the concept and the charm of To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. the real. This representational imaginary, which To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. both culminates in and is engulfed. by the carto- One implies a presence, the other an absence. But grapher's mad project of an ideal coextensivity the matter is more complicated, since to simulate between the map and the territory, disappears is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an with simulation - whose operation is nuclear illness can simply go to bed and make believe he and genetic, and no longer specular and discur- is ill. Some[oneJ who simulates an illness pro- sive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more duces in himself some of the symptoms." (Littre)5 mirror of being and appearances; of the real and Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: principle intact: the difference is always clear, it rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the simulation. The real is produced from miniatur- difference between "true" and "false," between ized units, from matrices, memory banks and "real" and "imaginary." Since the simulator pro- command models - and with these it can be duces "true" symptoms, is he ill or not? He can- reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no not be treated objectively either as ill, or as longer has to be rational, since it is no longer not-ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this measured against some ideal or negative instance. point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since the illness. For if any symptom can be "pro- it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no duced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of longer real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of nature, then every illness may be considered as an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its a hyperspace without atmosphere. meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" In this passage to a space whose curvature is illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the ill- simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all ness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrec- the symptom from the organic to the unconscious tion in systems of signs, a more ductile material order: once again, the latter is held to be true, than meaning, in that it lends itself to· all systems more true than the former - but why should of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of par- It sPaul-Maximilien·Emile Liltn! (1801-1888) translated the ody. is rather a question of substituting signs of works of science of the classical period, and compiled (1854) the real for the real itself, that is, an operation to a dictional)' of medicine and surgery, from which the deter every real process by its operational double, ticn is taken.

BA UDRILLARD ITHE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA 1937 "produced" in the same way as any other symp- any simulacrum in the temples because the divin- tom in classical medicine? Dreams already are. 6 ity that breathes life into nature cannot be repre- The alienist/ of course, claims that "for each sented.,,9 Indeed it can. But what becomes of the fo= of the mental alienation there is a particular divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is order in the succession of symptoms, of which the multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which supreme authority, simply incarnated in images the alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into sim- (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all ulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power cost the truth principle, and to escape the spectre of fascination - the visible machinery of icons raised by simulation - namely that truth, refer- being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea ence and objective causes have ceased to exist. of God? This is precisely what was feared by the What can medicine do with something which Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with floats on either side of illness, on either side of us today. 10 Their rage to destroy images rose pre- health, or with the reduplication of illness in a cisely because they sensed this omnipotence of discourse that is no longer true or false? What can simulacra, this facility they have of effacing God psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the from the consciousness of men, and the over- discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of whelming, destructive truth which they suggest: simulation that can never be unmasked, since it that ultimately there has never been any God, that isn't false either?8 only the simulacrum ·exists, indeed that God him- What can the army do with simulators? self has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had Traditionally, following a direct principle ofiden- they been able to believe that images only tification, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, occulted or masked the Platonic Idea of God, it can refo= an excellent simulator as though he there would have been no reason to destroy them. were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart- One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But case or lunatic. Even military psychology retreats their metaphysical despair came from the idea from the Cartesian clarities and hesitates to draw that the images concealed nothing at all, and that the distinction between true and false, between in fact they were not images, such as the original the "produced" symptom and the authentic symp- model would have made them, but actually per- tom. "If he acts crazy so well, then he must be fect simulacra forever radiant with their own fas- mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense that all cination. But this death of the divine referential lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinc- has to be exorcised at all cost. tion is the worst from of subversion. Against it It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are cl assical reason a=ed itself with all its cate- often accused of despising and denying images, gories. But it is this today which again outflanks were in fact the ones who accorded them their them, submerging the truth principle. actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in Outside of medicine and the a=y, favored ter- them only reflections and were content to vener- rains of simulation, the affair goes back to reli- ate God at one remove. But the converse can also gion and the simulacrum of divinity: "I forbad be said, namely that the iconolaters were the most

6Baudrillard's point is that the "truth principle," the explanatory power of medicine as positive science, is 9The quotation is not from the Bible, but reflects ened by the existence of psychosomatic symptoms in a simu- Baudrillard's rationale for the second commandment, at lating sufferer, because each disease becomes two diseases, Exodus 20:4. against idolatry; that a simulacrum eventually one produced by physical, the other by psychological causes. supplants the orjginal. Since dreams are psychological symptoms for the psychoana- 10Cf. NI. Perniola, "leones, Visions, Simulacres," Traverses/ lyst, Baudrillard speCUlates that they too can be produced by 10, p. 39. [Baudrillardl In the Byzantine empire of the eighth the simulating psyche. and ninth centuries, certain emperors ordered the destruction 7Early term for a psychoanalyst. of all pictorial representations of God. Protestant leaders of sAnd which is not susceptible to resolution in transfer- the sixteenth century. like Calvin and Zwingli, also favored ence. It is the entanglement of these two discourses which the destruction of religious art seen as idolatrous. Iconoc1asm makes psychoanalysis interminable. [Baudrillard] continues in the Islamic world.

THEORIZING POSTMODERNISM modern and adventnrous minds, since underneath value, from the sign as reversion and death sen- the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of tence of every reference. Whereas representation images, they already enacted his death and his tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false disappearance in the epiphany of his representa- representation, simulation envelops the whole edi- tions (which they perhaps knew no longer repre- fice of representation as itself a simulacrum. sented anything, and that they were purely a This would be the successive phases of the game, but that this was precisely the greatest image: game - knowing also that it is dangerous to - it is the reflection of a basic reality unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them). - it masks and perverts a basic reality This was the approach of the Jesuits, who - it masks the absence of a basic reality based their politics on the virtual disappearance - it bears no relation to any reality whatever: of God and on the worldly and spectacular manip- it is its own pure simulacrum. ulation of consciences - the evanescence of God In the first case, the image is a good in the epiphany of power - the end of transcen- appearance - the representation is of the order dence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strat- of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil egy completely free of influences and signs. appearance - of the order of malefice. In the Behind the baroque of images hides the grey emi- third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the nencel! of politics. order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in Thus perhaps at stake has always been the the order of appearance at all, but of simulation. murderous capacity of images, murderers of The transition from signs which dissimulate the real, murderers of their own model as the something to signs which dissimulate that there is Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialec- implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which tical capacity of representations as visible and the notion of ideology still belongs). The second intelligible mediation of the Real. All of Western inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on which there is no longer any God to recognize his representation: that a sign could refer to the depth own, nor any last judgment to separate true from of meaning, that a sign could exchange for mean- false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since ing and that something could guarantee this everything is already dead and risen in advance. exchange - God, of course. But what if God him- When the real is no longer what it used to be, self can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a pro- signs which attest his existence? Then the whole liferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; system becomes weightless, it is no longer any- of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. thing but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but There is an escalation of the true, of the lived a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is experience; a resurrection of the figurative where real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted the object and substance have disappeared. And circuit without reference or circumference. there is a panic-stricken production of the real So it is with simulation, insofar as it is and the referential, above and parallel to the panic opposed to representation. The latter starts from of material production: this is how simulation the principle that the sign and the real are equiva- appears in the phase that concerns us - a strat- lent (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a egy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal whose uni- fundamental axiom). Conversely, simulation versal double is a strategy of deterrence .... 12 starts from the utopia of this principle of equiva- lence, from the radical negation of the sign as 12Baudrillard here hints at something he will discuss at llThe term "grey eminence" (eminence grise) originates in length later, the way in which proxy conflicts of various kinds Father Joseph, the Capuchin monk who was confessor to (including the Vietnam \Var) serve as simulations standing for Cardinal Richelieu, and who was thought to be the true center but deterring the nuclear war between the United States and of power during the reign of Louis XIII. the USSR.

BAUDRILLARDITHE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA 1939 HYPERREAL AND IMAGINARY "real" America, which is Disney land (just as Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entancrled prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the ?rde:s of simulation. To begin with it is a pIa; of social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, IllusIOns and phantasms: Pirates, the Frontier, which is carceral). Disneyland· is presented as Future World, etc. This imaginary worldis sup- imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest posed to be what makes the operation successful. is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the But what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much America surrounding it are no longer real, but of more the social microcosm, the miniaturized the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is and religiolls revelling in real America in its no longer a question of a false representation of and drawbacks. You park outside', queue reality (i.deology), but of concealing the fact that up InsIde, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In the real IS no longer real, and thus of saving the in:aginary world the only phantasmagoria is reality principle. In the Inherent warmth and affection of the crowd The Disney land imaginary is neither true nor and in that sufficiently excessive number of false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to gets used there to specifically maintain the multi- rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. tudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concen- this imaginary. It is meant to be an infantile tration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole world, in order to make us believe that the adults range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal flows - outside, solitude is directed onto a single t?e fact that real childishness is everywhere, par- gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coin- tIcularly amongst those adults who go there to act ciden?e (one that undoubtedly belongs to the the child in order to foster illusions as to their real peculIar enchantment of this universe), this deep- childishness. frozen infantile world happens to have been con- Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. ceived and realized by a man who is himself now Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine cryogenized:Walt Disney, who awaits his resur- World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imagi- rection at minus 180 degrees centigradeY nary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, The objective profile of America, then, may to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is be traced throughout Disneyland, even down nothing more than a network of endless, unreal to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. ci;culation - a town of fabulous proportions, but All its values are exalted here, in miniature and WIthout space or dimensions. As much as electrical comic strip form. Embalmed and pacified. Whence and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios th.e possibility of an ideological analysis of town, which is nothing more than an (L. M.arin does it well in Utopies, scnpt and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old d dIgest of the American way of imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked hfe, panegync to American values, idealized phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system. transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that POLITICAL INCANTATION "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artifi- 13It is merely an urban legend that Walt Disney cial perimeter): though here it is a scandal effect his body cryogenically preserved in the hope concealing that there is no difference between of resusCItated some day. In fact his body was cremated the facts and their denunciation (identical meth- and hIS ashes rest at Forest Lawn cemetery. It is unclear ods are employed by the CIA and the Washington whether Baudrillard actually believes the urban leoend or w?ether it served as a useful image with Post journalists). Same operation, thoucrh this DIsneyland s mtended resurrection-effect, to turn the adult time tending towards scandal as a means to'" regen- visitor into a child again. erate a moral and political principle, towards the

194 0 THEORIZING POSTMODERNISM imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality prin- about the idea of the contract which is imputed to ciple in distress. it - it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, The denunciation of scandal always pays nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened" thought homage to the law. And Watergate above all suc- which.seeks to control capital by imposing rules on ceeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a it. And all that recrimination which replaced revo- scandal- in this sense it was an extraordinary lutionary thought today comes down to reproach- operation of intoxication. The reinjection of a ing capital for not following the rules of the game. large dose of political morality on a global scale. "Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capi- It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The tal exploits us, etc." - as if capital were linked by specific character of every relation of force is to a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that force only because it is so dissimulated," under- capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the stood as follows: capital, which is immoral and social contract and fulfill its obligation towards the unscrupulous, can .only function behind a moral whole of society (anhe same time, no need for rev- superstructure, and whoever regenerates this pub- olution: it is enough that capital accept the rational lic morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) formula of exchange). spontaneously furthers the order of capital, as did Capital in fact has never been linked by a con- the Washington Post journalists. tract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of But this is still only the formula of ideology, and the social relation, it is a challenge to society and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, to be denounced according to moral and eco- and he denounces this relation of force as itself a nomic rationality, but a challenge to take up scandal- he therefore occupies the sanae deter- according to symbolic law. ministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging 14 and reviving moral order, an order of truth wherein THE END OF THE PANOPTICON the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is It is again to this ideology of the lived experience, engendered, well beyond all relations of force, of exhumation, of the real in its fundamental banal- which are only its indifferent and shifting config- ity, in its radical autheuticity, that the American 15 uration in the moral and political consciousness Tv-verit6 experiment on the Loud family in 1971 of men. refers: 16 7 months of uninterrupted shooting, 300 All that capital asks of us is to receive it as hours of direct non-stop broadcasting, without rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, script or scenario, the odyssey of a family, its dra- to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name mas, its joys, ups and downs - in brief, a "raw" of morality. For they are identical, meaning they historical document, and the "best thing ever on can be read another way: before, the task was to television, comparable, at the level of our daily dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none. 14Prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Watergate is not a scandal: this is what must Bentham (1748-1832); its key feature was that every inmate be said at all cost, for this is what every one is con- could be seen at all times by the guard. :tYIichel Foucault cerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a cusses the Panopticon in his book, Discipline and Punish, strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we mentioned by Baudrillard later. 15Baudrillard plays on the French word for "documentary approach the primal (mise en) scene of capital: its film," cinema-verite, literally "film-truth," instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible feroc- 16BaudrilIard's topic is Ali America Family. a ity, its fundamental immorality - this is what is documentary covering the daily life of an affluent Santa scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of Barbara family, William and Pat Loud and their five children, which was shot by Allan and Susan Raymond beginning in moral and· economic equivalence which remains 1971. During filming the marriage of the Lauds broke up, and the of leftist thought, from Enlightenment the film also "outed" the family's gay son, Lance. The theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn gram was first aired by the public television network in 1973.

BA UDR1LLARD ITHE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA 1941 existence, to the film of the lunar landing." Things Tv-verite. Admirable ambivalent terms: does it are complicated by the fact that this family came refer to the truth of this family, or to the truth of TV? apart during the shooting: a crisis flared up, the In fact, it is TV which is the Loud's truth, it is it Louds went their separate ways, etc. Whence that which is true, it is it which renders true. A truth insoluble controversy: was TV responsible? What which is no longer the reflexive truth of the mirror, would have happened ifnr hadn't been there. nor the perspective truth of the panoptic system and More interesting is the phantasm of filming the of the gaze, but the manipulative truth of the test Louds as ifnr wasn't there. The producer's trump which probes and interrogates, of the laser which card was to say: 'They lived as if we weren't there." touches and then pierces, of computer cards which An absurd, paradoxical formula - neither true, nor retain your punched-out sequences, of the genetic false: but ntopian. The "as if we weren't there" is code which regulates your combinations, of cells equivalent to "as if you were there." It is this utopia, which inform your sensory universe. It is to this this paradox that fascinated 20 million viewers, kind of truth that the Loud family is subjected by much more than the "perverse" pleasure of prying. the TV medium, and in this sense it really amounts In this "truth" experiment, it is neither a question of to a death sentence (but is it still a question of secrecy nor of perversion, but of a kind of thrill of truth?). the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a thrill The end of the panoptic system. The eye of TV of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a thrill of aliena- is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and tion and of magnification, of distortion in scale, of the ideal of control is no longer that of trans- excessive transparency all at the same time. The joy parency. The latter still presupposes an objective in an excess of meaning, when the bar of the sign space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipo- slips below the regular water line of meaning: the tence of a despotic gaze. This is still, if not a sys- non-signifier is elevated by the camera angle. Here tem of confinement, at least a system of scrutiny. the real can be seen to have never existed (but "as if No longer subtle, but always in a position of exte- you were there"), without the distance which pro- riority, playing on the opposition between seeing duces perspective space and our depth vision (but and being seen, even if the focal point of the "more true than nature"). Joy in the microscopic panopticon may be blind. simulation which transforms the real into the hyper- It is entirely different when with the Louds real. (This is also a little like what happens in pomo, "You no longer watch TV, TV watches you (live)," where fascination is more metaphysical than sexual.) or again: "You no longer listen to Pas de Panique, This family was in any case already some- Pas de Panique listens to you" - switching over what hyperreal by its very selection: a typical, from the panoptic apparatus of surveillance (of California-housed, 3-garage, 5-children, well-to- Discipline and Punish) to a system of deterrence, do professional upper middle class ideal American where the distinction between active and passive family with an ornamental housewife. In a way, it is abolished. No longer is there any imperative to is this statistical perfection which dooms it to submit to the model, or to the gaze. "YOU are the death. This ideal heroine of the American way of model!" "YOU are the majority!" Such is the slope life is chosen, as in sacrificial rites, to be glorified of a hyperrealist sociality, where the real is con- and to die under the fiery glare of the studio fused with the model, as in the statistic operation, lights, a modem fatum. For the heavenly fire no or with the medium, as in the Loud's operation. longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens Such is the later stage of development of the which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, social relation, our own, which is no longer one of putting it to death. "The Louds: simply a family persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, ideo- who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands logy, publicity, etc.) but one of dissuasion or of television, and to die from it," said the pro- deterrence: "YOU are news, you are the social, the ducer. So it is really a question of a sacrificial event is you, you are involved, you can use your process, of a sacrificial spectacle offered to voice, etc." A turnabout of affairs by which it 20 million Americans. The liturgical drama of a becomes impossible to locate an instance of the mass society. model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium

1942 THEORIZING POSTMODERNISM itself, since you are always already on the other longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now side. No more subject, focal point, center or intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and periphery: but pure flexion or circular inflection. it can no longer even be said that the latter is dis- No more violence or surveillance: only "informa- torted by it. tion," secret virulence, chain reaction, slow implo- Such immixture, such a viral, endemic, chronic, sion and simulacra of spaces where the real-effect alarming presence of the medium, without our again comes into play. being able to isolate its effects - spectralized, like We are witnessing the end of perspective and those publicity holograms sculptured in empty panoptic space (which remains a moral hypothe- space with 'laser beams, the event filtered by the sis bound up with every classical analysis of the medium - the dissolution of TV into life, the dis- "objective" essence of power), and hence the very solution of life into TV - an indiscernible chemi- abolition of the spectacular. Television, in the cal solution: we are all Louds, doomed not to case of the Louds for example, is no longer a invasion, to pressure, to violence and to black- spectacular medium. We are no longer in the mail by the media and the models, but to their society of spectacle which the situationists talked induction, to their infiltration, to their illegible about, nor in the specific types of alienation and violence. repression which this implied. The medium itself But we must he careful of the negative twist is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging discourse gives this: it is a question neither of an I7 of the medium and the message (l'vIcLuhan ) is illness nor of a viral complaint. Rather, we must the first great formula of this new age. There is no think of the media as if they were, in outer orbit,

17The medium/message confusion! of course, is a correla- tive of the confusion between sender and receiver, thus seal- From now on, it is impossible to ask the famous question: ing the disappearance of all the dual, polar which "From what position do you speak?" - fonned the discursive organization of language, referring to "How do you know?" - the celebrated grid of functions in Jacobson, the organization "From where do you get the power?," without of all detenninate articulation of meaning. "Circular" ately getting the reply: "But it is of (from) you that I speak"- course must be taken literally: that is, it no longer goes from meaning, it is you who speaks, it is you who knows, power is one point to the other but describes a circle that indistinctly you. A gigantic circonvolution, circumlocution of the spoken incorporates the positions of transmitter and receiver, hence- word, which amounts to irredeemable blackmail and forth unlocatable as such. Thus there is no longer any instance able deterrence of the subject supposed to speak, but left with- of power, any transmitting authority - power is something out a word to say, responseless, since to questions asked can that circulates and whose source can no longer be located, a come the inevitable reply: but you are the reply, or: your cycle in which the positions of dominator and the dominated tion is already an answer, etc. - the whole sophistical interchange in an endless reversion which is also the end of glehold of forced confession disguised as free power in its classical definition. The circularization of power, expression, trapping the subject in his own questioning, the knowledge and discourse brings every localization of cession of the reply about the question (the whole violence of instances and poles to an end. Even in psychoanalytic interpretation in there, and the violence of the conscious or pretation, the "power" of the interpreter does not come from unconscious of "speech"). any external authority, but from the interpreted themselves. This simulacrum of inversion or involution of poles, this This changes everything, for we can always ask the traditional clever subterfuge which is the secret of the whole discourse of holders of power where they get their power from. Who made manipulation and hence, today, in every domain, the secret of all you Duke? The King. And who made the King? God. God those new powers sweeping clean the stage of power, forging alone does not reply. But to the question: who made the the assumption of all speech from which comes that fantastic choanalyst? the analyst quite easily replies: You. Thus is silent majority characteristic of our times - all this undoubtedly expressed, by an inverse simulation, the passage from the began in the political sphere with the democratic simulacrum, "analyzed" to the "analyzand," from active to passive, which that is to say with the substitution of the instance of the people only goes to describe the swirling, mobile effect of the poles, for the instance of God as source of power, and the substitution its effect of circularity in which power is lost, is dissolved, is of power as representation for power as emanation. An resolved into complete manipulation (this is no longer of the Copernican revolution: no longer any transcendent instance nor order of the directive authority and the gaze, but of the order any sun nor any luminous source of power and knowledge- of personal contact and commutation). See, also, the everything comes from and returns to the people. It is [throughl State/family circularity secured by the floating and metastatic this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of regulation of images of the social and the private. (J. manipulation, from the scenario of mass suffrage to present-day Donzelot, The Policing of Families) and illusory opinion polls, begins to be installed. [Baudrillard]

BA UDRILLARD ITHE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA 1943 a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation vector, decoding, a dimension of which we ]mow of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other, nothing - it is no longer even a "dimension," or micromolecular code controls the passage of the perhaps it is the fourth (that which is defined, signal from a representative sphere of meaning to however, in Einsteinian relativity, by the absorp- the genetic sphere of the programmed signaL 18 tion of the distinct poles of space and time). In The whole traditional mode of causality is fact, this whole process only makes sense to us in brought into question: the perspective, deter- the negative form. But nothing separates one pole ministic mode, the "active," critical mode, the from the other, the initial from the terminal: there analytical mode - the distinction between cause is just a sort of contraction into each other, a fan- and effect, between active and passive, between tastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two tradi- subject and object, between ends and means. It tional poles into one another: an IMPLOSION - an is in this mode that it can be said: TV watches absorption of the radiating model of causality, of us, TV alienates us, TV mauipulates us, TV the differential mode of determination, with its informs us .... Throughout all this one is depen- positive and negative electricity - an implosion dent on the analytical conception whose vanish- of meaning. This is where simulation begins. ing point is the horizon between reality and Everywhere, in whatever political, biological, meaning. psychological, media domain, where the distinc- On the contrary, we must imagine TV on the tion between poles can no longer be maintained, DNA model, as an effect in which the opposing one enters into simulation, and hence into poles of determination vanish according to a absolute manipUlation - not passivity, but the nuclear contraction or retraction of the old polar non-distinction of active and passive. DNA real- schema which has always maintained a minimal izes this aleatory reduction at the level of the liv- distance between a cause and an effect, between ing substance. Television itself, in the example of the subject and an object: precisely, the meaning the Louds, also attains this indefinite limit where gap, the discrepancy, the difference, the smallest the family vis-a-vis TV is no more or less active or possible margin of error, irreductible under penalty passive than is a living substance vis-a-vis its of reabsorption in an aleatoryl9 and indeterminable molecular code. In both there is only a nebula process which discourse can no longer even indecipherable into its simple elements, indeci- account for, since it is itself a determinable order. pherable as to its truth. It is this gap which vanishes in the genetic cod- ing process, where indeterminacy is less a product ORBITAL AND NUCLEAWo of molecular randomness than a product of the abolition, pure and simple, of the relation. In the ... Yet, despite this deterrence by the orbital process of molecular control, which "goes" from authority - the nuclear code or molecular- the DNA nucleus to the "substance" it "informs," events continue at ground level, mishaps are there is no more traversing of an effect, of increasingly more numerous, despite the global an energy, of a determination, of any message. process of contiguity and simultaneity of data. "Order, signal, impulse, message": all these But, subtly, these events no longer make any sense; attempt to render the matter intelligible to us, but they are nothing more than a duplex effect of sim- by analogy, retranscribing in terms of inscription, ulation at the summit. The best example must be the Vietnam war, since it was at the crossroads of a maximal historical or "revolutionary" stake and 18BaudriIlard is analogizing the televisionllife relationship to the DNNorganism relationship. DNA carries information that codes the organism. and in that sense is a simulacrum for ;WHere Baudrillard explores the idea of war as theater, the organism; mutations in the DNA cause changes in the where the simulacra are proxy conflicts within the 1946-1989 organism. Similarly, Baudrillard argues, television gives the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, with viewer a picture of life, a simulacrum that is translated into a China as a third major player. In an omitted section, vision of human meaning that controls how people live. Baudrillard considers the "orbital" space race in which the 19 Aleatory means "random" (aleator is Latin for dice- United Stales and USSR competed in a proxy war to put a player). man into Earth orbit and then onto the moon. I •

1944 THEORIZING POSTMODERNISM the installation of this deterrent authority. What troops, it could stop: it had attained its objective. sense did that war make, if not that its unfolding Thus the stake was a political relay. When the sealed the end of history in the culminating and Vietnamese proved they were no longer bearers of decisive event of our age? an unpredictable subversion, it could be handed Why did such a difficult, long and arduous war over to them. That "this was a communist order vanish overnight as if by magic? wasn't fundamentally serious: it had proved itself, Why didn't the American defeat (the greatest it could be trusted. They are even more effective reversal in its history) have any internal repercus- than capitalists in liquidating "primitive" pre- sions? If it had truly signified a setback in the capitalist and antiquated structures. planetary strategy of the USA, it should have Same scenario as in the Algerian war.22 necessarily disturbed the internal balance of the The other aspect of this war and of all wars American political system. But no such thing since: behind the armed violence, the murderous happened. antagonism between adversaries - which seems Hence somethiug else took place. Ultimately a matter of life and death, and which is played as this war was only a crucial episode in a peaceful such (otherwise you could never send out people coexistence. It marked the advent of China to get smashed up in this kind of trouble), behind to peaceful coexistence. The long sought-after this simulacrum of a struggle to death and of ruth- securing and concretizing of China's non- less global stakes, the two adversaries are funda- intervention, China's apprenticeship in a global mentally as one against that other, unnamed, never modus vivendi, the passing from a strategy of mentioned thing, whose objective outcome in war, world revolution to one of a sharing of forces and with equal complicity between the two adversaries, empires, the transition from a radical alternative is total liquidation. It is tribal, communal, pre- to political alternation in a now almost settled capitalist structures, every fo= of exchange, lan- system (normalization of Peking-Washington guage and symbolic organization which must be relations): all this was the stake of the Vietnam abolished. Their murder is the object of war - and war, and in that sense, the USA pulled out of in its immense spectacular contrivance of death, Vietnam but they won the war. war is only the medium of this process of terrorist And the war "spontaneously" came to an end rationalization by the social- the murder through when the objective had been attained. This is why which sociality can be founded, no matter what it was de-escalated, demobilized so easily.21 allegiance, communist or capitalist. The total com- The effects of this same remolding are legible plicity or division of labor between two adver- in the field. The war lasted as long as there saries (who can even make huge sacrifices to reach remained unliquidated elements irreducible to that) for the very purpose of remolding and domes- healthy politics and a discipline of power, even a ticating social relations. communist one. When finally the war passed from "The North Vietnamese were advised to counte- the resistance to the hands of regular Northern nance a scenario of the liguidation of the Americatt presence through which, of course, honor must be 21Baudrillard's theory is that the 1963-1975 Vietnam War preserved." had to continue as long as the United States was convinced The scenario: the extremely heavy bombard- that its Vietcong opponents were proxies for China, and that ment of Hanoi. The intolerable nature of this defeat in Vietnam would mean defeat by China throughout Asia. As soon as President Nixon reached a separate settle- ment with China, and control of the war passed to North 22Like the U.S.Nietnam War, the Algerian war of Vietnam, ideology became irrelevant, the proxy aspect of the pendence (1954-1962) posed a Western colonial government Vietnam \Var vanished, the war itself became a merely local against a popuHst independence movement. Baudrillard's conflict that could be quickly settled. The heavy bombing of interpretation of the 1962 endgame of the war would empha- Hanoi just before the withdrawal of U.S. forces was a differ- size the mutation of the popular Algerian movement (the ent simulacrum intended for home consumption: the images FLN) into an official political party under Ahmed Ben Bella of the bombing (which would cost many lives but would not and Houari Boumedienne, and the willingness of France to change the political situation) would mitigate the appearance relinquish its colony to a government that would take power that the United States had been defeated. and repress the remnants of its populist base.

BA UDRILLARD ITHE PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA I94S bombing should not conceal the fact that it was simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same, only a simulacrum to allow the Vietnamese to and the dead ex-combatants count as much there seem to countenance a compromise and Nixon to as in other wars. That objective is always amply make the Americans swallow the retreat of their accomplished, like that of the partitioning of ter- forces. The game was already won, nothing was ritories and of disciplinary sociality. What no objectively at stake but the credibility of the final longer exists is the adversity of adversaries, the montage. reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological Moralists about war, champions of war's seriousness of war - also the reality of defeat or exalted values should not be greatly upset: a war victory, war being a process whose triumph lies is not any the less heinous for being a mere quite beyond these appearances.

Jtirgen Habermas b. 1929

Jilrgen Habemzas, the most significant social philosopher in Gelmany and the Marxist most quoted by liberal humanists, was bam in DUsseldorf and educated at the Universities of Gottingen and Zurich before taking his Ph.D. at Bonn in 1954. He taught at the University of Marburg and at Heidelberg before moving in 1964 to the Institute for Social Research at Fran/ifurt, where, as professor of phi- losophy, he was Theodor Adomo's assistClnt at the end ofAdamo's career. Since 1981, Habermas has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Science at Stamberg; he also teaches at Northwestern University. Habennas has published nearly thirty books, including Knowledge and Human Interests (1968). Toward a Rational Society (1971). Legitimation Crisis (1971). Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985). Autonomy and Solidarity (1986). On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1988). The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate (1989). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990). The Structural Transfonnation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1991). Remarks on Discourse Ethics (1993). Between Facts and Nonns (1996). and The Pragmatics of Communication (1998). Habenllas's most recent work has taken up intemational politics: The Postnational Constellation (2001). Religion and Rationality: Essays of Reason. God, and Modernity (2002). and Philosophy in a Time of Terror (with Jacques Den·ida. 2003). In 2004. Habelmas won philosophy's equivalent of the Nobel. the Kyoto Prize; his acceptance speech was on "The Public Role of Religion in a Secular Conte.r:t. .. The following essay. "Modemity verSllS Postmodemity" originated as a talk on the occasion of Habennas's acceptance of the Adamo prize awarded by the city of Frankfurt in 1980.

THEORIZING POSTMODERNISM